Requirements Engineering Challenges and Techniques in Building Chatbots

Abstract

The proper execution of requirements engineering processes can be decisive for the success of software development and, for chatbots, it is no different. Chatbots have been gaining a lot of space, especially in customer service. Requirements engineering processes for chatbots are as hard to perform as for any other machine-learning system and the conversational nature makes it even harder. Taking this into consideration, in this work we survey chatbot practitioners to unveil the requirements elicitation and documentation techniques they have been using in the industry, besides the challenges they face while going through this process. Responses show that elicitation techniques are not much far from techniques used in other fields, but for documentation techniques that are new forms of documentation such as conversation flows. Moreover, meeting stakeholder’s requirements and managing information exchange are their biggest challenges in eliciting and documenting chatbot requirements.